Celluloid Heroes

Bear with me for a moment.

If you are what some might call paranoid--that is, you think the world is in a conspiracy to get you (a confederacy of dunces), and you alter your behavior to prevent or preclude this from happening, which, in turn, attracts the attention of those in charge who, do, indeed get you, is the good news that you're cured of your paranoia or that you were never paranoid in the first place?

I know people who have deep-seated feelings of inadequacy. I tell them they are the most realistic people I know, because they truly are inadequate-it's not a delusion at all. They think I'm hysterical and should be doing stand-up. What makes them think I'm not, I wonder?

Each of us encounters obliviots everyday. They are so engrossed in the movie of their lives they're making in their heads, the rest of us are bit players and for the most part walk-ons. You know the people I mean: the person who pulls out from the curb without using a blinker or a mirror, causing you to take six months off your brakes to keep from hitting them and when you look up, they're just choogling down the street, happy as a clam (whatever that means) blithely unaware of what nearly happened.

There's the shopper who leaves the cart strategically in the center of the aisle, in such a way that no matter what you do, you can't get by and when you move the cart, they appear from nowhere and glare at you as if you were stealing the food from their cat's table (you've guessed my prejudice, haven't you?).

And we've all tried to get along with the person who sees major world events as an obstacle to her or his personal happiness...that trip to Newport has to be postponed because the President is in Newport that weekend for a Summit on World Hunger ('stupid summit...stupid hunger'). Yeah, it's all about them and we're so lucky to share their planet.

These are the roosters who've convinced themselves that, because they crow, the sun comes up. And all of us are welcome, even when we forget to say thank you. It turns out, because here in the Air Age we have an affliction for everyone, we have invented an illness for sickening self-absorption (anything to not have to take personal responsibility, thank goodness!). It's called the Truman Show Delusion. I had thought (hoped?) it was a condition in which the sufferer thought Jim Carrey was funny, but it's more serious than that. People see their lives as a TV show. I'm not sure how this particular conceit places or explains most major historical or life events, but if you think the world is a TV show, it's possible that rational answers aren't high up on your list of 'must-have' items.

Remember The Prisoner with Patrick McGoohan in the late Sixties? There are parts, Adam, where McGoohan sounds like he's spotted the movies behind the snowglobes "…We all live in a little Village… Your village may be different from other people's villages but we are all prisoners." And now it seems, more of us everyday believe the machinery and scenery are all props. Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my closeup, but are you? "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about the answers."
-bill kenny